Wednesday, November 08, 2017

Latest F-35 talking points don't even mention stealth...

The F-35A Conventional Takeoff and Landing variant is an agile, versatile, high- performance 9g multirole fighter that provides unmatched capability and unprecedented situational awareness to the U.S. Air Force and its allies around the world. Lockheed Martin photo by Liz Lutz. f35.com

Hmm. First make sure you read the caption on the pic above.

Next, notice that there is a photo dump of the F-35 after news is breaking out in the UK and Denmark doubting the capabilities and cost of the plane.

Finally check out that caption again. Agile, versatile, high performance multi role fighter? I disagree with that but let's just roll with it for now.

What happened to affordable and stealth?

You do get the force of connection don't you? The talking point has changed once again. If I'm right I think this is the fourth time. First stealth was the big bad that couldn't be copied. But we heard from Raytheon about their GaN tech with the Russians, Chinese, SAAB and others saying that they could detect stealth too, so the stealth talking point vanished.

Then they hit on the sensor fusion. But everyone FINALLY asked what did they mean by fusion and that talking point took a hit. It all came back to the AESA array and even the most batshit crazy fanboy had to admit that legacy planes could carry more powerful arrays and that the EOTS on the F-35 was being outperformed by the latest offerings already on the market.

Looking for a way out of this trap they switched to affordability. They put out several press alerts about how the cost of the F-35 was rapidly going down. But under close examination by others, that was quickly left in the ditch bleeding from a thousand cuts with the program office once again looking like a bunch of liars.

So now they're back to what we see above.

If I wasn't so convinced that the F-35 is a failure of epic proportions it would be funny.